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Experts on retail sales are obsessed with Thanksgiving weekend — particularly the Black Friday frenzy.

Most pundits agree that the start of the season was just ho-hum. But if you examine the details, you’ll come across all sorts of disagreement over exactly how things have gone. Why is it so hard to judge how many shoppers turned out, and how much they spent?

Here are some answers.

How important is Thanksgiving weekend as a predictor of the season?

The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the season. In recent years, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day of the year. But it’s not considered a predictor of the rest of the season, since it accounts for 10 percent of total holiday sales.

Still, pundits study the weekend’s receipts to decipher shoppers’ mind-sets. And if stores have a weak start, chances are slim that they will be able to make up for lost sales.

What makes this season’s kickoff particularly hard to assess?

One major factor is that stores have increasingly been hawking deals and offering expanded hours throughout November. That has likely diluted sales for the holiday weekend.

Parsing the data got even trickier because for the first time, major merchants offered early morning Black Friday specials on their websites at the same time as in their stores, as they aimed to compete with pure online retailers.

That helped boost online sales on Thursday and Friday, which rose 11 percent compared with a year ago, according to comScore Inc same day payday loans., an Internet research company. Also, more stores, like Old Navy, were open on Thanksgiving.

"Black Friday was definitely expanded. It wasn’t as concentrated," said Bill Lewis, executive vice president of Karabus Management, a retail advisory firm. He noted that heavy online buying likely depressed store traffic.

What type of data has been out there in recent days? Any contradictions?

The National Retail Federation released data on spending and traffic late Sunday, based on an online poll of 5,000 shoppers. The group extrapolated that total spending reached $41.2 billion for Thursday through Sunday, up 0.5 percent from a year ago; it reported 195 million people were visiting stores and websites, compared with 172 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, research firm ShopperTrak released data that showed customer counts actually declined 1.1 percent for the Friday-through-Sunday weekend, but showed sales were up a more robust 1.6 percent.

When will we get a full picture of the start of this year’s holiday season?

Major retailers’ individual sales reports should offer some sense, even though most figures exclude online business.

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